The Vans / The North Face / Timberland NOligarchy Profile
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Vans / The North Face / Timberland — the portfolio of brands operated by VF Corporation — scores 71.92 out of 100 on the NOligarchy scale. That places the company above the sector average of 69.7, making it a marginally stronger performer on corporate accountability than most of its peers — though the pillar breakdown reveals some sharp contradictions beneath that composite number.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
72.6
Wealth Extraction
55.0
Playing by the Rules
90.0
Score history — 23 quarters
Tier bands show where each quarter's score falls — no numeric y-axis needed. The dashed ring marks the year-over-year comparison point. Tap any quarter but the first to see its pillar breakdown.
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Political Access Grade: 72.64/100. A focused lobbying operation, funded with $70,000 in federal lobbying dollars aimed entirely at trade policy — staffed by two former Senate insiders paid to influence the very rules they once helped write.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 54.95/100. A CEO earning 564 times the median employee’s salary, dividend payments totaling hundreds of millions routed to shareholders, and a tax position holding contested claims equal to 79% of the company’s pre-tax income.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 90.0/100. No recorded regulatory fines — but the company simultaneously collected more than $7 million in state tax credits while lobbying to reshape the trade rules governing its global supply chain.
Vans / The North Face / Timberland ranks 10th out of 23 companies in the Clothing and clothing accessories retailers sector — a position that sits just above the sector average of 69.7. That modest edge over peers is driven by the clean enforcement record; the wealth extraction pillar, at 54.95, remains a significant drag and reflects real imbalances in how the company distributes its financial returns.
The Bottom Line: A CEO Earning 564 Times the Median Worker While Dividends Flow to Shareholders
From Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 — the two-year tracking period (8 quarters) — Vans / The North Face / Timberland generated $9.6 billion in annual revenue and kept a remarkably clean legal record. But that clean record sits alongside a CEO paid 564 times what the typical employee takes home, $303.1 million and $140.2 million in dividends paid to shareholders in the two most recently reported fiscal years, and a trade lobbying effort staffed by two former Senate insiders. The sharpest imbalance here is not what the company paid in fines — it’s the vast distance between what a Vans store employee earns and what the person at the top collects, compounded by a structure that has consistently channeled corporate cash toward investors rather than the workforce.
Former Senate Insiders Deployed on a Single Trade Agenda
Vans / The North Face / Timberland poured $70,000 into federal lobbying in 2024, all of it concentrated in a single calendar year and all of it aimed at one issue: trade policy. The majority — $50,000 — landed in Q3 2024, tapering to $20,000 by Q4 2024.
The entire lobbying effort ran through a single outside firm and targeted the same piece of legislation across multiple filings: the Generalized System of Preferences Reform Act (H.R. 7986), which would reauthorize and update the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) — a federal program that allows certain imported goods from developing countries to enter the United States duty-free. Lobbyists cited H.R. 7986 three separate times across the filings. The bill remained in progress as of December 2024, when it was placed on the Union Calendar — meaning the lobbying had real and ongoing stakes. The brand portfolio, which sources apparel and footwear from a global supply chain spanning dozens of countries, has a direct financial interest in how U.S. import duties are structured: tariffs paid at the border come straight out of the company’s margins.
Filings also referenced the Coalition Economic Partnership of the Americas and making the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) region more competitive — both framing the same fundamental business driver: reducing the cost of importing goods manufactured abroad. One filing additionally noted “general business matters, including VF Sustainability efforts,” though no further detail was provided.
The company lobbied both chambers — the House of Representatives and the Senate — three times each.
FEDERAL CONTACT LOG
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
3
≈ every 167th business day
SENATE
3
≈ every 167th business day
2 federal bodies named in federal lobbying filings · 2024-Q3–2026-Q2
Between 2024-Q3 and 2026-Q2, Vans / The North Face / Timberland was named in lobbying filings reaching 2 federal bodies — from HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES to SENATE.
What makes the access particularly pointed is who was doing the lobbying. Two of the four registered lobbyists are former government insiders: Paul Delaney, who served as International Trade Counsel for the Senate Finance Committee and Deputy Chief of Staff at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR); and Christopher Sullivan, a former Legislative Assistant to Senator Johnny Isakson and former Staff Director of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs and Competitiveness. These are not generalist advocates — they are former architects of the very trade policy the company is now paying to influence. That institutional access is the point.
No Political Action Committee (PAC) spending was recorded during this period, and no executive individual contributions were reported in Federal Election Commission (FEC) records.
A 564-to-1 Pay Gap and a Dividend Pipeline to Shareholders
The starkest number in the public record for Vans / The North Face / Timberland is the gap between what its top executive earns and what a typical employee takes home. According to the company’s SEC DEF 14A, the CEO pay ratio is 564:1. The median employee at Vans, The North Face, or Timberland earned $33,567 in the most recently reported fiscal year — a paycheck that does not cover rent in most cities where these brands operate retail locations. The CEO’s total compensation in the most recent reported fiscal year was about $18.9 million.
Put plainly: for every dollar a typical worker earned, the CEO pocketed $564. That ratio is not a quirk of the math — it reflects deliberate choices about how to structure compensation at the top versus the bottom of the organization.
No stock buybacks were recorded during the two-year period. But the company has consistently handed money to shareholders through dividends. According to SEC 10-K filings, dividends totaled $303.1 million in fiscal year 2024 and $140.2 million in fiscal year 2025 — a sharp decline that reflects the company’s deteriorating financial position, not a redirection of cash toward its workers. Those payments — made while the pay gap sat at 564-to-1 — flowed overwhelmingly to the wealthiest shareholders. The wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of all publicly traded stock, meaning the bulk of those hundreds of millions went to people who needed it least, while frontline employees collected earnings that hovered near poverty-level in high-cost markets.
The Tax Position: Vans / The North Face / Timberland paid an effective tax rate of 25.3% — 4.3 percentage points above the 21% federal statutory rate that Congress set. Paying above the statutory floor may appear unremarkable on the surface. But the picture becomes considerably more complicated when you examine the unresolved tax claims sitting on the company’s books.
Statutory federal rate
21%
This company
25.3%
Vans / The North Face / Timberland's effective federal tax rate was 25.3% against the 21% statutory rate — -4.3 percentage points drained away.
The company holds Unrecognized Tax Benefits equal to 79% of its pre-tax income — contested deductions it has claimed on its taxes that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has not yet agreed are valid. An amount equivalent to nearly the entire company’s pre-tax profit is sitting in legal limbo. The 10-K filing does not provide a detailed narrative explanation of what drives these contested claims, and no specific mechanisms or offshore jurisdictions are identified to explain them. What is on the public record is that nearly 80 cents of every dollar of pre-tax profit the company reports is simultaneously the subject of a tax claim the IRS has not confirmed.
A Clean Enforcement Record Alongside $7 Million in State Tax Credits
Vans / The North Face / Timberland carries no recorded regulatory fines across the two-year tracking period from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026. No violations appear on the public enforcement record. For a company operating retail brands at the scale of The North Face and Vans, that is notable.
What is equally notable is what happened in parallel. While the company faced no penalties from regulators, state governments handed it more than $7.2 million in tax credits and rebates between 2024 and 2025. According to Good Jobs First Subsidy Tracker, two tax credit grants were issued — $3,695,538 in 2025 and $3,562,613 in 2024 — both flowing directly to the company.
EXHIBIT — ONE TEACHER-YEAR AT A TIME
101 years of an average teacher’s salary
The $7.3 million in public subsidies Vans / The North Face / Timberland collected would fund 101 years of an average teacher's salary.
The picture here is not neutral. A company simultaneously lobbying Congress to reduce its import costs, paying its CEO 564 times the salary of its median worker, and collecting millions in state tax credits presents a particular portrait of who the tax and subsidy system is working for. A clean enforcement record is genuinely meaningful — but it does not tell the full story of how public resources flow toward a corporation at scale.